This studio will explore innovative material assemblies as a site for reconsidering contemporary domesticity in the context of ecological change and climate adaptation. The studio looks to principles of mutualism and cohabitation as a way to imbue architecture with a renewed ethos of care at multiple ecological scales. We will study models of both human and more-than-human habitation as precedents and inspiration for how architects might re-conceptualize and re-materialize domestic space. Central to this inquiry will be a focus on techniques of design computation and digital fabrication, and how such tools can be leveraged to open up new material strategies for domestic habitation across scales and species. The intent is to consider how potential entanglements among beings and species may offer new possibilities for productive coexistence and ecological care. The site for the studio’s research will be the suburban landscape of Fremont, California, a dense, low-rise city of over 230,000 people and one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the Bay Area. Fremont faces severe vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change, largely due to the fact that sixty years of channelization has prevented tributaries like Alameda Creek (which runs through the city) from sufficiently recharging the Bayland marshes with enough sediment to counteract erosion that is increasingly exacerbated with sea level rise. The studio will embrace a pedagogy of informed speculation, in which scientific research, material experimentation, and speculative thinking inform and catalyze one another. Inspiration will be drawn from a wide range of domestic architecture and world-building, including Indigenous practices of ecological stewardship, modernist prototypes for rethinking domestic space, counter-cultural experiments with communal living, and theories of care as it extends to architectural and ecological thinking. Note: this course is aligned with the Digital Craft concentration.

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